Cleveland, a city in northeastern Ohio, was initially known as a manufacturing capital. Today, however, it is now known as the newest and hottest tech hub in the nation.

While it hasn’t yet reached the levels of the country’s more established tech hubs like San Francisco, New York, and Seattle, it is showing great promise as more and more entrepreneurs move in. This may be because of the city’s growing entertainment scene and its increasing number of accelerator programs.

Start-ups in the Cleveland area amassed a whopping $578 million in venture capital deals last year.

Not only that – it was also last year when Cleveland was hailed the third-largest region in the Midwest for biotechnology and biomedical companies, with over $3 billion worth of investments given to more than 700 companies.

Cullen Fischel of Cleveland explores the growing tech ecosystem and the start-up companies that are currently making waves.

Starting in The Land: Top 5 Cleveland Start-Ups to Watch Out For

Wisr

Founded in 2016, Wisr’s focus is higher education student engagement. The goal of the Wisr software is to help colleges and universities encourage student engagement for the duration of their schooling years.

Students are enabled to connect with faculty members, student leaders, and other students for educational guidance and advice through the Wisr platform. Other features of the platform include virtual experiences and online admissions recruitment for institutions.

Proformex

Also founded in 2016 is Proformex, a digital platform that monitors and manages insurance policies.

Serving financial agents, advisors, institutions, and broker-dealers, the Proformex platform offers end-to-end solutions for life insurance policies. This includes automated requests, archiving essential policy documents, and constant monitoring of policy performance.

Axuall

Axuall, a workforce intelligence company, developed its platform in 2018 with the support of leading healthcare organizations.

The main focus of this start-up is digital credential authentication and verification, facilitating real-time sharing of digital credentials within a medical facility. 

Their platform allows health professionals to manage and share digital proof of identity healthcare organizations, with the goal of lessening the burden of paperwork while simultaenously focusing on patient care, reducing operating costs, and improving revenue.

Brilliency

Founded in 2014, Brilliency is a utility management app that allows users to track, control, and manage all their utilities in a single platform. Brilliency partners with various utility providers so that individuals can check on the status of their electric, water, and gas accounts at any time.

Farm Fare

With a focus on local food supply chain management, the aim of Farm Fare is to connect the local food supply chain from source to destination. Founded in 2016, the company connects food hubs with each other to share resources and information to work together. 

In addition, Farm Fare hires the services of local and underutilized food delivery trucks to transport the food.

Apart from the start-ups mentioned above, there are many others that contribute to Cleveland’s status as a tech hotspot. With the success rate of the city’s start-ups, we can only expect Cleveland to soon become a new reigning tech capital.